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National Priorities: Demands, Resources, Dilemmas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Margaret Sprout
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The publications listed above exemplify the debate over national priorities that is gathering mass and momentum in the United States. With respect to each, we shall indicate the perspective of the author(s), scope of the work, and thrust of conclusions. We shall then suggest some broader sources and implications of this debate and its end product, the allocation of resources.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 See “The Dilemma of Rising Demands and Insufficient Resources,” World Politics, XX (July 1968), 660–91Google Scholar; and Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth (New York 1971), esp. chaps. 15 and 19Google Scholar.

2 In a broad sense, social conditions are all part of the environment. However, we shall follow the prevailing usage that more or less consistently restricts the concept of environment to the physical habitat, including man-made structures and other changes upon, or associated with, the surface of the earth.

3 This and related themes are developed upon a larger canvas in Lockard, Duane, The Perverted Priorities of American Politics (New York 1971)Google Scholar. The author, professor of politics at Princeton University, is especially concerned with such questions as why Americans so generally tolerate an ordering of priorities that progressively pollutes and depletes our once magnificent country, and erodes the moral as well as material supports of our national polity. More specifically, why do we tolerate “a relentless racism . . . a murderous imperialism, and the blind pursuit of economic advantage whatever the consequences?” (p. viii).

4 One recent book on national priorities that does give major attention to political structures and interagency and intergovernmental relations is Professor Lockard's The Perverted Priorities of American Politics. This book includes a fresh look at Congress, the courts, the executive establishment, federal-state relations, and the party system. It also emphasizes the dehumanizing tendencies that Lockard perceives in American society: among others, the progressive displacement of people by machines, elimination of humane considerations in the “setting of priorities because human beings do not need to be considered,” the impersonality “characteristic of massive operations in business, education, industry, or government,” a spreading sense of individual isolation and helplessness, a concomitant dulling of moral sensibilities, and chronic inability of most Americans to comprehend, or even to believe, the evidence of misery and injustice that the American juggernaut mindlessly inflicts on millions of its own citizens as well as on countless millions in other countries. Ibid., 306, 308, and passim.

5 The total of $77 billion for 1969 in the Lederman-Windus analysis represented an advance estimate which fell short of actual expenditures by over $3 billion.

6 Liska, George, Imperial America (Baltimore 1967), 106Google Scholar.

7 H. and M. Sprout, “The Dilemma of Rising Demands and Insufficient Resources” (fn. 1), 667–68.